Remember when Altavista was the search engine? Or Yahoo? They stuffed their search pages with useless, distracting crap, and using them became unpleasant. And then, bam, along came Google, with a simple, clear search page and uncluttered search results. However, now that Google has become this massive behemoth, tracking our every move, and tailoring our search results, leading to only being fed those pages you agree with - isn't it time for something new? Something simple? It might be, and you've undoubtedly heard of them: DuckDuckGo. I'm switching. Update: Just got an email from Gabriel Weinberg, the guy behind DuckDuckGo. The OSNews !bang (!osnews) is now live!

You (and many others), on the other hand do, and what I ask is that you please elaborate on WHAT that threat is.

Oh that's so simple I assumed you figured that out by yourself.

As LulzSec and Anonymous have shown - no data repository is safe from hackers. Say Google gets hacked, and search data, purchase data, and god knows what else is out on the street. Criminals could simply take a peek at the data, see when you booked your family vacation, and burgle your home. They don't even need to stake out any more. A simple peek at such data, et voila.

The data doesn't even need to be leaked. You have no idea what kind of people have access to this data at Google, or, in the case of a subpoena, who in the government has access to it. What if they sold such data to criminals? Such data is incredibly valuable, and there's no reason to assume that just because people work for the government or Google that they won't be susceptible towards abuse of the access they have.

This has nothing to do with weirdo black helicopter bullshit - these are real and valid concerns, especially after what LulzSec, Anonymous, and others have shown us.